It’s no secret that BlackBerry doesn’t make smartphones anymore. To think that they were once at the top of the pecking order, it’s kind of upsetting to see how far they’ve fallen. There are many reasons why BlackBerry faltered and a lot of it had to do with their refusal to adapt to the changing tides.
But, what if they did? A new leak reveals that the company very nearly hopped on board the modern smartphone train nearly three years ago.
This handsome all-touch smartphone is supposedly the handset that bore the codename “Ontario”. It made its debut in the rumour mill around the same time as BlackBerry’s Passport, but, as we know today, this phone never saw the light of day.
According to the leaks, the phone was supposed to pack a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM and run on BlackBerry 10.3 OS. If it came out, it would have been the flagship device to replace BlackBerry’s Z30.
Clearly, the company felt that this modernised all-touch BlackBerry wasn’t the way forward because instead of releasing the Ontario, BlackBerry launched the Passport — which has a physical QWERTY keyboard — instead. But if they did release Ontario, would it have been enough to bring the company back from the brink?
Well, I don’t think so. To me, the fundamental problem with BlackBerry’s old devices lay in its OS. BlackBerry, much like Nokia, stubbornly stuck to their own operating system that lacked the app support which is what gave the smartphone its mass-market appeal. They were also adamant about keeping many of their apps — like BBM — locked into the BlackBerry ecosystem.
I definitely prefer this current iteration of BlackBerry. The BlackBerry that’s trying to secure my favourite operating system so I can keep all my apps, all my features and all the things I enjoy doing on a smartphone with the peace of mind that the security experts behind BlackBerry’s legendary software now have my back.
What do you guys think, though? Do you think that releasing the Ontario would have been the right move for BlackBerry? Let me know in the comments below.
